Keith Senior has had better weeks. He's in trouble with both his management at Leeds and the Rugby Football League for calling Richard Silverwood arrogant after his refereeing performance in last Sunday's World Club Challenge, but the greater regret for the veteran centre will surely be the loss of discipline that went a long way towards condemning the Rhinos to a second consecutive defeat by the Australian champions.

Senior's verbal attack on Silverwood during the match, conceding a penalty that allowed Cameron Smith to kick Melbourne ahead for the first time, was as potty as it was costly. Yet as with his lengthy outburst outside the Leeds United dressing room at Elland Road an hour or so later, it was easy to sympathise with big, bad, bald Keith.

His frustration at Silverwood's indulgence of the spoiling tactics that Melbourne have turned into an ugly art form was shared by anyone else in the stadium, or watching at home, who had been hoping for a spectacle to rival last year's Challenge in which Leeds were outclassed by Manly.

It was a shockingly weak refereeing performance that the Storm exploited expertly, while Leeds appeared to be taken completely by surprise. Their coach, Brian McClennan, had declared confidently after a stodgy Super League victory over Salford nine days earlier that the Rhinos were looking forward to a faster game with cleaner rucks against Melbourne. As it turned out, the play-the-balls were as slow as anything seen in this country for years – and, as McClennan and his players conceded afterwards, Leeds failed to adjust.

With the exception of Senior, they didn't whinge, which made the comments from Australia's controller of referees, Robert Finch, even harder to stomach. "You could say they're whingeing or you could say what you like, but the bottom line is they were playing under an English referee and under English interpretations," said Finch. But those were nothing like English interpretations, a point best summed up for me by an Aussie journalist covering the game – who said how much he'd preferred the slower pace of the rucks at Elland Road to the "touch and pass" he'd watched at the Super League fixtures at Castleford and Wakefield on the previous two nights.

As Finch added, the evidence of last year's Leeds-Manly game suggests that Melbourne would probably have won an equally fast contest with plenty to spare. If only we'd had the chance to find out.

The responsibility for that has to lie with Silverwood and his attempt to revert to international interpretations, whatever they are. Which brings us to Senior's second spray, for which I'd offer a double defence. First, give the bloke some credit for being prepared to answer journalists' questions when he emerged from the dressing room, rather than rushing past with a muttered "No comment". Second, his irritation with Silverwood, and I suspect with Super League refereeing in general, is by no means unique.

Only the previous night at Castleford, the Tigers supporters had been infuriated when a series of marginal video refereeing decisions went against their team in a narrow defeat by Hull KR. As so often, the video official – in this case Steve Ganson – was put in an impossible position by the idiotic instruction to award the benefit of the doubt to the attacking team. That same instruction has now led to the last two major club games in this country - last year's grand final and now the WCC - being disfigured by Leeds tries that should not have been awarded. The game is being brought into disrepute, or at least inviting mockery, on a worryingly regular basis.

The previous weekend, Ganson had been put in an equally sticky situation by an equally crazy decision to appoint him as the referee for the Catalans Dragons' first home game of the season in Perpignan – where he has become the least popular English referee with the passionate French fans – even though they were playing St Helens, his local club.

There are so many unnecessarily irritating and provocative decisions like that being made regarding the game's referees, which makes their near-impossible job even harder – and undermines the Rugby Football League's admirable and ground-breaking Respect campaign to provide support for all match officials, among whom the likes of Ganson, Ian Smith, Robert Hicks and Gareth Hewer stand out as having produced splendidly low-profile and empathetic performances in recent weeks.

Yet the RFL seem as complacent about such self-inflicted wounds as they are about the disillusionment felt by supporters of lower league clubs following the indulgence of the Crusaders' move from Bridgend to Wrexham, and now the uncertainty over the rules governing Toulouse's application for a Super League place.